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My favorite side hustle

I’ve heard a lot of talk about side hustles lately. I’m told that every millennial engages in some kind of side hustle to supplement their income and I quietly thought that the frequency of millennial side hustles was overstated because I never had a side hustle. I assumed that side hustles were for people that were underemployed because who has time for a side hustle? Seriously, who has time to be a dog walker, a podcaster, a fedex truck detailer, or Uber Driver? And then I read this article and realized that I had a side hustle when I was still in school. In fact, my side hustle was literally number #1 on that list.

While in school, I bought and sold Mac computers from people on Craigslist. My strategy? I traveled between two small cities that had colleges. One city had famous fashionand tech schools, and the other had a large university. The students at the fashion and tech schools were obsessed with obtaining the latest and greatest Apple products. The students at the huge university in the other city, were just looking for cool reliable new-ish Macs.

I found I could buy 1-3 year old Mac pro and Mac mini desktop computers for 150-350 in one location and sell them for 400-1000 dollars in the other city. Apparently, I was the only person in the one city looking at Craigslist for a nearby city. Seriously, they weren’t even that far apart. The drive was like 45 minutes.

I got amazing deals when I would buy computers that had insufficient ram for recent Mac OS X updates. The sellers assumed their macs were broken or dated and would think they were scamming me by selling me the Mac, an apple keyboard, and Apple trackpad for $150 without telling me the machine was super slow. I’d get it home, order cheap new ram from an online retailer like NewEgg for under $70, and then flip the Mac for $400, and get an extra $50 for the track pad and keyboard.

Did I ever make huge money? No. I also didn’t really do anything but troll Craigslist periodically and make offers on macs that were being sold for cheap. However, it kept me from borrowing more student loans and kept plenty of food in my fridge. I estimate that I spent maybe 3 hours a week on it and made a few hundred dollars per month.

Apparently, you can have a profitable little side hustle and not even know it. In retrospect, I’ve had other side hustles, but this was my favorite. Money earned simply by looking at a nearby city’s Craigslist page as opposed to just the listings in my city. If you keep your eyes open, money is literally just waiting to be found like hundred dollar bills on the ground.